Contents

You have no doubt heard some of the “I lost everything on my hard drive” stories that have come from feeble attempts to install various flavors of Linux in a dual boot system with Windows.
Partitioning hard drives is probably not a good idea for the typical computer user, but the desire to learn more about Linux while keeping the Windows option open is entirely too mouth watering for the eager mind to resist. I have a story or two myself. Here are the basics I have learned about Linux and the best way to learn Linux while preserving ALL of your Windows files, etc.

Applications

Instructionals

Software developers are very familiar with toolchains, series of programs where the output of one program forms the input for the next. A free software example would be using the GNU Emacs editor, the GNU bin-utils and the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to write a program. Software developers frequently create programs and subroutines that are used in other programs rather than recoding the same process over and over again.

UberStudent is upping the ante with its plans to offer free online courses, using the Moodle learning environment, to teach students to academically excel with its platform. UberStudent dubs itself ‘a free Linux learning platform for learning, doing, and teaching academic computing at the higher education and advanced secondary levels’.

“I began UberStudent as a way to place sets of smart and dedicated computing tools, and just the right amount of support, into the hands of college and college-bound secondary students,” said Stephen Ewen, UberStudent’s founder and lead developer. “At core, it’s an academic success curriculum in the form of an installable, ready-to-go learning platform. With UberStudent, students can learn to really excel at the skills and habits they must have to succeed in college,” he added.

PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Like Mandriva Control Center, for example. It’s a very user friendly distro. It just needs to be a bit leaner, faster and less obnoxious to look at. If you want a heavyweight distro with a general ease-of-use, speed and looks, with a good KDE implementation and the latest software, plus all the proprietary drivers out of the box and um, music playing while the OS boots, I’d recommend going for Sabayon rather than Mandriva. The two fall in the same category, but Sabayon seems to be winning.

This is, of course, ridiculous. There’s no reason all lemonade stands need to be for-profit enterprises. Kids learn a variety of lessons from lemonade stands. Charging might teach valuable lessons about budgeting and self-sufficiency, but giving lemonade away can teach equally valuable lessons about generosity and public service. Savage apparently doesn’t care what the girls’ parents might have hoped their kids would get out of the experience. The mere fact that the girls were failing to conform to the neoclassical model of homo economicus was enough to condemn their activity.

That’s a frivolous example, to be sure, but the same mixture of intellectual laziness and arrogance crops up in more serious contexts. I’ve written before about this Richard Epstein column where he criticizes the free software movement for, basically, failing to conform to the assumptions of the neoclassical model:

The open source movement shares many features with a workers’ commune, and is likely to fail for the same reason: it cannot scale up to meet its own successes. To see the long-term difficulty, imagine a commune entirely owned by its original workers who share pro rata in its increases in value. The system might work well in the early days when the workforce remains fixed. But what happens when a given worker wants to quit? Does that worker receive in cash or kind his share of the gain in value during the period of his employment? If not, then the run-up in value during his period of employment will be gobbled up by his successor – a recipe for immense resentment. Yet that danger can be ducked only by creating a capital structure that gives present employees separable interests in either debt or equity in exchange for their contributions to the company.

This passage bears no relationship to reality. Free software projects scale up just fine without “a capital structure that gives present employees separable interests in either debt or equity.” Contributors are not employees or shareholders. The inability to cash out does not, in fact, generate “immense resentment.” And Epstein could have learned all of this pretty easily if he’d talked to a few people in the free software community before writing his column. But why let facts clutter up a perfectly good theory?

If you prefer to host a viewer and images on your own site, check out
the Swivel Viewer site at code.google.com, where you’ll find an open source embeddable album viewer that also supports zooming and panning.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are helping the U.S. military analyze and develop the advantages of open-source software — programs that make their source code open to others so it can be changed and improved.

Bringing many minds to bear on a given program can lead to software that is both high quality and low cost, or even free. For example, the Linux operating system, which licenses its basic source code for free, is now used to run many servers in companies, government and academia.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

Seriously – is there any exciting and new we could communally do before in the next month? My guess it would have to be in the area of data-driven chemistry. I was talking with Jean-Claude Bradley at breakfast about liberating chemical reactions from the literature. There will be new science in that. Not world-shattering, but worthy.

The biggest problem many data-driven apps contests have is that it’s too hard to get started. A developer has to download some strange dataset off of a website like data.gov or the National Data Catalog, prune it, massage it, usually fix it, and then convert it to their database system of choice, and then they can start building their app. It reminds me of being a Linux user before APT existed. While fun, it was still a hassle to get all dependencies and compile everything from source.

D.C. Superior Court Judge Judith Bartnoff issued a temporary restraining order against the National Law Journal last Friday after she discovered the news organization was planning to publish a story regarding the fee dispute between District of Columbia-based law firm Hogan Lovells and one of its former clients, beverage maker POM Wonderful. POM had hired Hogan Lovells to represent the company during a regulatory investigation.

Jess Bachman, infographic designer extraordinaire, shares this new work which shows how Glenn Beck “uses his influence to peddle dubious information and endorse fraudulent companies, and how how those companies go about scamming fear ridden consumers into buying terrible investments.”

The Justice Department said on Thursday it sued Oracle Corp, alleging it defrauded the federal government on a software contract in effect from 1998 to 2006 that involved hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.

If you ever needed convincing that the world of American “national security” is well along the road to profligate lunacy, read the striking three-part “Top Secret America” series by Dana Priest and William Arkin that the Washington Post published last week. When it comes to the expansion of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), which claims 17 major agencies and organizations, the figures are staggering.

Global temperatures in the first half of the year were the hottest since records began more than a century ago, according to two of the world’s leading climate research centres.

Scientists have also released what they described as the “best evidence yet” of rising long-term temperatures. The report is the first to collate 11 different indicators – from air and sea temperatures to melting ice – each one based on between three and seven data sets, dating back to between 1850 and the 1970s.

Finance

Citigroup agreed on Thursday to pay $75 million to settle federal claims that it failed to disclose vast holdings of subprime mortgage investments that were deteriorating during the financial crisis and ultimately crippled the bank.

A top Federal Reserve official warned Thursday that the nation faces the risk of an extended period of falling prices known as deflation, such as that experienced by Japan over the past two decades.
This Story

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Fed official warns of deflation risk for U.S.
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Fed ready to step in if economy relapses
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Ezra Klein: The economy can’t recover until the economy recovers

James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, argues in a new paper that large-scale quantitative easing — or purchases of government bonds and other assets by the central bank — would be the best policy tool to prevent that possibility, though he doesn’t endorse making such a move now.

Sam and Charles Wyly, billionaire Texas brothers who gained prominence spending millions of dollars on conservative political causes, committed fraud by using secret overseas accounts to generate more than $550 million in profit through illegal stock trades, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Thursday.

President Barack Obama on Friday heralded the recent turnaround for U.S. automakers, arguing that thousands of jobs and increased production vindicate his unpopular decision to bailout the industry.

With Americans facing a still-limping economy and potentially pivotal congressional elections in three months, Obama is seizing on the positive new trends in the auto industry as evidence of broader economic good news. He launched an intensive campaign to highlight the story as a concrete area of improvement with direct ties to his administration’s actions.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

After six months worth of allegations of privacy invasions involving some of the largest Internet companies, it should come as no surprise that politicians are calling for new laws. The fact that it’s an election year probably made it inevitable.

Oh, and just to make this all more comically depressing, just as I finished reading both of these stories, I saw a story about a new investigation into reports that FBI agents were caught cheating on an exam, which was designed to get them to stop abusing surveillance tools. Yes, you read that right. After all the reports of abuse of surveillance tools, the FBI set up a series of tests to train FBI agents how to properly go about surveillance without breaking the law… and a bunch of FBI agents allegedly cheated on the test that’s supposed to stop them from “cheating” on the law. And, not just a few. From the quotes, it sounds like this cheating was “widespread.” But, of course, it might not matter, since the requirements for surveillance are being lowered, oversight is being blocked, and apparently the White House is willing to retroactively “legalize” any illegal surveillance anyway.

In its latest delve into the state of the nation’s broadband provision, the regulator praised infrastructure providers for a 25 percent increase in the speed of the average actual fixed-line residential connection. The average connection was advertised to have a speed of up to 10Mbps in May 2010, compared to 8 percent in April 2009.

Intellectual Monopolies

This paper provides empirical evidence on how intellectual property (IP) on a given technology affects subsequent innovation. To shed light on this question, I analyze the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private firm Celera, and estimate the impact of Celera’s gene-level IP on subsequent scientific research and product development outcomes. Celera’s IP applied to genes sequenced first by Celera, and was removed when the public effort re-sequenced those genes.

It’s right under your nose, in the form of intellectual property created by you & your lab. Don’t let your invention representing millions in potential revenue sit idle simply because you aren’t aware IP & patent protection laws and other key aspects of moving innovations from your lab to the market..

Copyrights

In a recent Wired.com article, Gibson was certainly candid about the money-making potential of his approach. “Media companies’ assets are very much their copyrights. These companies need to understand and appreciate that those assets have value more than merely the present advertising revenues,” he said.

But in my phone conversation with him, he also characterized his approach as the best way to discourage infringing activity. “There are these folks out there who say, ‘Oh, they should send out a takedown letter.’ But people have been sending takedown letters for over a decade now and it’s had little or no effect on infringements. Infringements continue to grow.”

Michael Geist points us to the news that The British Library has apparently come out with a new report entitled Driving UK Research — Is copyright a help or a hindrance? The paper brings together 13 different researchers to all share their opinions, and the general consensus appears to be that copyright today is a serious problem in need of reform (and, no, the “Digital Economy Act” in the UK didn’t help at all).

There was an amusing post this week at TheWrap.com discussing how the various Hollywood movie studios are confused about the basics of social media and Twitter. You may remember (or, maybe not), back in 2003, when Hollywood suddenly started blaming text messaging for certain movies failing, because some kids would go to a movie, realize it sucks, and quickly warn their friends to stay away. Of course, Hollywood blamed text messaging, instead of the fact that they made a crappy movie, and couldn’t rely on their old methods of squeezing a ton of money out of people before word got around. In the age of Twitter, of course, this has only increased, so the studios started blaming Twitter, calling it “the Twitter Effect” and proceeding to freak out about it.

Just last week we were talking about Perfect 10′s lawsuit against Google in Canada, where we noted that in Perfect 10′s own bragging press release, it effectively admits that its takedown filings were not properly filed. They admit that they just sent images to Google saying that it owned the images, without telling Google where they were actually located to take down. This was the same charge that Rapidshare recently made against Perfect 10, noting that the company seemed to purposely not want companies to take down their images, so that it could sue.

ACTA

While the parties have not formally disclosed it, the immediate ACTA schedule now appears to include discussions between the U.S. and the EU next month in Washington followed by a full round of talks (Round Ten) in Japan in September. Some have criticized the exclusion of the remaining ACTA countries in the August discussions, but as I posted earlier, the ACTA text has really come down to a U.S. vs. EU document with the remaining countries picking a side. The sticking point in Washington will undoubtedly be scope of the treaty, with the EU pushing for inclusion of geographical indications and the U.S. making it clear they are willing to cave on almost anything that does not involve changes to domestic law. Geographical indications would require change, however, which is what led to my post speculating about the possibility of an ACTA without Europe.

Summary: Alison Brimelow’s referral to the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EU) is discussed again and the US continues to demonstrate the failure of systems with software patents

SOMEONE has just mailed us this article (which we missed) because it covers the Brimelow referral [1, 2, 3], discusses the conflict of interests, and also provides some historical background to software patents in Europe. It says that “About 40 years ago, when the founding fathers of the EPO began considering seriously the wording of a European Patent Convention, one of the questions they had to consider was what to do about patenting in the fledgling computer technology scene. At the time no one could really have understood or appreciated how computing would develop or how the patent system might cope, and trying to build a comprehensive system was probably beyond their bounds. So computer programs were lumped in as exclusions together with games, business methods and mental acts, a magnificent loophole was inserted and they presumably concluded that a few decades of technical and legal development would allow a more comprehensive answer to the problem. On May 12 2010, the Enlarged Board of Appeal, Europe’s highest IP tribunal, issued an opinion that proved conclusively that the draftsmen all those years ago had been absolutely right. No one understands computer programs or how they should be patented.”

Europe ought to learn from the United States’ mistakes. The market there is being harmed by software patents, large victims of which include Facebook.

Reutersreports about the expensive failure of such issues, which only seem to benefit lawyers/litigators in this case.

Facebook Inc won a legal fight on Wednesday over claims its hugely popular social networking website infringed a patent owned by Leader Technologies, but the little-known company said it would ask the judge to set aside the verdict.

The jury has declared the patent invalid. Clearly, the only explanation is that the jury was also made up of idiots. Next time, Leader Technologies should file the lawsuit in East Texas where they know how to make juries, rather than Delaware.

Why is it that Europe hardly has any patent trolls? Maybe there is indication here that abstract ideas in computing have no place in patent offices. The EPO will hopefully never emulate the USPTO. Programmers in Europe are put in a position of advantage as long as software patents stay away and the Shazam story is a recent example of this [1, 2, 3] (this Dutch developer did not need to censor his work). █

Summary: talkstandards.com upsets IBM’s Rob Weir and Microsoft’s patent troll Nathan Myhrvold may not be failing (at extortion) as much as some people assume

A Microsoft lobbyist which we last mentioned in the morning (talkstandards.com) has just caught the attention of IBM’s Rob Weir, who found this new posting about an upcoming “Online Forum” rather objectionable. Weir wrote: “Why not talk about the lack of tension with genuine open standards?”

I told him about talkstandards.com goal’s and he told me: “Don’t like the name. I was thinking of creating a site called “DoStandards””

As a quick recap, talkstandards.com is promoting patents inside standards and it almost always pushes Microsoft’s line. The FFII’s president calls it a Microsoft lobby. But there are worse things than mere lobbyists for software patents; Microsoft has created and groomed Intellectual Ventures (IV), which we last wrote about yesterday because someone claimed that it was failing. Mike Masnick disagrees:

[T]he IRR for a venture fund, especially in the early years, is pretty meaningless. A typical venture fund lasts ten years, and the first few years is when all that money is being invested, and there’s no real returns. On top of that (and, more importantly), the IRR is usually reported based on a totally made up number, which is what the VCs believe their portfolio is valued at, since it doesn’t involve a liquid market. VCs were afraid that publishing such numbers would freak people out, and lead VCs to focus on more short-term investments. I don’t think that’s really happened, but it does appear that the Intellectual Ventures funds represented here (showing IRRs of -73% and -10%) might not really mean anything.

Without knowing the details of what those funds represent, or how long the timeframe is for those funds, it’s difficult to assess what’s really going on. It does look like IV isn’t valuing its first fund very highly any more, and considering it’s Intellectual Ventures I, perhaps you can assume it’s further along in the process. But, in a game where a sudden “home run” can change things quickly (even if we’re talking about patent infringement lawsuits or licensing demands, rather than true venture investments), it’s difficult to make any serious call on the performance just yet.

The software patents machinations are frequently tied to Microsoft. It’s no coincidence because there is a lot at stake for Microsoft, not just Apple (which also invests in Intellectual Ventures to extort and terrify everyone). █

Apple starts patenting mobile app ideas

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Three Apple patent applications that just became public on USPTO website. From the looks of them, it seems that Apple is now trying to patent mobile app ideas. For now Apple is seeking to get a patent for 3 apps – travel, hotel and high fashion shopping.

“Throw Ballmer, Gates and Jobs out of our planet. Planet will become happy,” said one of our readers about it.

iPad Not for Linux Users: Survey results

According to a recent survey of 20,000 users carried out by MyType, results found that iPad users tend to put themselves into a different category compared to Linux Users. Linux was set up to provide a service on a mobile device, a tablet computer or a video games console. It was found that Linux is aimed at more self-directed, science minded users who enjoy playing video games on a Linux PC, than the iPad user who in general is a professionally business minded individual, who has to have the latest device with a level of portability.

While the decision by the US Library of Congress to create exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for unlocking cellphones and jailbreaking iPhones (among other things) in the USA are very welcome, the reaction has been just a touch too euphoric. Not by everyone, mind you. Dan Gilmore begins to explain why this isn’t a solution, and Wendy Seltzer nudges close to the problem as well. But plenty of people think they’ve been granted more than they really have.

Apple is not just a company. It’s a culture and a mindset that puts at risk everyone’s freedom (as defined by law and practice). People ought to actively resist Apple. █

“The great task in front of us over the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something that is stable and robust and not so pretty, into something that is art [...] Can we not only emulate, but can we blow right past Apple?”

“I ran into Lefty at a community summit out here a while back, and his emotional state was really high. He explained his beef with RMS with a cry in his voice, I kid you not. When I was less than sympathetic, he practically ran out of the room in tears. Now, I am no stranger to getting emotional about things. But I’ve learned that it doesn’t generally help me win the argument. He really needs to focus on ACCESS, which, IMO, is a sinking ship. RMS isn’t the big problem in front of him.”

Right now, for a number of reasons, there is a fever pitch of tribalism in plain sight in the free software world. It’s sad. It’s not constructive. It’s ultimately going to be embarrassing for the people involved, because the Internet doesn’t forget. It’s certainly not helping us lift free software to the forefront of public expectations of what software can be.

As pointed out by Greg de Koenigsberg, Red Hat outperforms Canonical on a 16:1 ratio. You can imagine that some of the Ubuntu fans don’t like to hear this.

So after Jeffrey Stedfast puts out his reply, we now also have Jono Bacon stepping in.

Jono’s main argument is that Canonical does a lot on top of GNOME, but on their own, using their own tools and build environment. And he calls this “contributing”.

I beg to differ.

At the end he states that ‘if you accept that contribution means “adding something TO the upstream project so that it is an integral part of it” the argument of Greg still holds strong. So far Red Hat has contributed 16x more to GNOME as Canonical.’ Separately, Wildeboer shares this new cartoon.

“Vilifying a company for not giving much except market share to GNU/Linux is misguided.”Personally, I have been defending Ubuntu all along because unlike Novell, Canonical did not sign a patent deal with Microsoft. To make matters more interesting, it was Novell that approached Microsoft to sign a patent deal, whereas it was Microsoft that approached Canonical to sign a patent deal (and Mark Shuttleworth’s team shrewdly declined.).

Software patents are the #1 barrier to Free software adoption. Vilifying a company for not giving much except market share to GNU/Linux is misguided. What about all those embedded device makers which distribute loads of Linux copies but rarely — if ever — give anything in return? Ubuntu is just an easy target, so it would be more constructive to avoid flames. Novell on the other hand is spreading Microsoft tax on Linux. Is that acceptable? Novell is in someways an extension of Microsoft in the technical sense too. █

Summary: The unfortunate effects of Windows replacing some of NetWare’s functionality

Novell is a company in decline and its old servers are being replaced, sometimes by Microsoft’s. Watch the new YouTube video whose description is “Novell Server AMSP03 was finally phased out, and ready for PowerDown.”

US, Spanish and Slovenian law enforcement authorities on Wednesday announced the arrest of the suspected creator of the “Mariposa Botnet,” a vast network of virus-infected computers used by criminal hackers.

The suspect, a 23-year-old Slovenian citizen identified only as “Iserdo,” was arrested by Slovenian police last week, the FBI, the Slovenian Criminal Police and the Spanish Guardia Civil said in a joint statement.

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The FBI said the arrests were the result of a two-year joint investigation into the Mariposa Botnet, which may have infected as many as eight million to 12 million computers around the world.

That would be “eight million to 12 million” Windows computers in just a single botnet. They ought to call out Windows. █